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Firas Khatib is a postdoctoral researcher in David Baker’s Laboratory in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Washington. He is currently trying to cure cancer by getting people to play online video games, specifically Foldit, but has yet to break the news to his grandmother who would not approve. Firas received his PhD in Bioinformatics from UC Santa Cruz in 2008 where he gave the graduate commencement speechfor the school of engineering; luckily they still gave him his degree.

The University of Washington are investigating whether the brainpower of humans worldwide can be brought to bear on critical problems posed in computational biology. The long term goal of this project is to utilize the combined power of humans and computers in order to build accurate models of disease-related proteins by introducing a new approach: distributed computing driven by human intuition.

The problem of accurate prediction of protein structures remains one of the most important unsolved dilemmas in biology.